> Meanwhile, H.264 has dedicated hardware decoders in world+dog devices, including ancient ones.

Ancient ones, yes, but most devices sold in the past five years have AV1 *decode* support.

Hardware with AV1 *encode* is still pretty rare but a fair number of up-market chips from the past few years have it.

What we mostly care about here is the $20 amtel or mediatek devices sold today, and those are fine.

Netflix can support the older devices with H.264 as long as it makes more sense to pay the patent license fees than to drop support for old devices.

It won't be long before there are no devices that the manufacturer still supports that can't decode AV1 in hardware. Not that most end-users even know their device went EOL and now a potential liability.

Given that Netflix has native apps on most of these systems it should be straightforward to serve the non-patented stream to any device that can play it well.

> They don't do backups at those outfits?

We really need Federal government backups to be centralized at the National Archives.

Both so one expert team can make sure it's done right, instead of hundreds of teams with questionable experience and track records attempting to do it right.

And /also/ so when one agency goes, "whoopise, I guess we deleted the evidence of our crimes!" there is recourse.

Right now, the prosecutor just goes, "shucks, I guess we don't have a case then. Better fire some leaf-node IT contractor."

Steve Lehto has a good video about this.

In Michigan the Lemon Law applies to problems that 'reduce the value to the consumer'.

Some people are attempting to return their cars over these popup ads. IIRC it was GM that was much more aggressive but I might have that detail wrong.

This pattern keeps re-emerging.

Online payment systems want your bank login details.

Facebook was infamous for scraping your IMAP account for contact information.

etc.

The implications for security are so severe I wouldn't mind if this were illegal, but certainly it should be legal for banks or cell providers to terminate online accounts of people who share their credentials, no matter if - or especially if - they are with other large corporations. How many times has T-Mobile been hacked in the past two years?

If an account holder wanted to download a data export and upload that to another provider I don't really care so much. It's the near mandatory sharing of credentials that is just such a terrible habit to normalize.

And yes, greybeards, we know you've never heard of apartment rental agencies only accepting Venmo for rent.

> So you can drive it but you cannot look at it?

Is there a difference between riding on a rocket and giving Russia the technical knowledge to build a thousand of them?

Personally I think Russia could figure it out if they wanted to but that's not why the rules are in place.

> Was he just being a rocket geek?

90% likely but the 10% difference is why there are rules that cannot be broken.

He signed up for obeying the rules, so it was a dumb move.

> "conserve energy! Ditch your tungsten! Go LED!" ... or the Planet will die in Hellfire!

( "you may be in a psyop when..." )

FWIW I replaced the warm white LED's in one quarter of my rooms with incandescents last week. Turns out current LED's contribute to diabetes.

It's been 20 years since I switched to CFL's and LED's and I was genuinely surprised how different (and really good) it feels to sit under a 200W incandescent.

The crazy thing is 20 years ago my lighting usage was over 2KW for my house whereas my entire house is now 1.4KW, typically, but the electricity bill has quadrupled while the usage fell in half so really it's an 8x.

Hence my investment in solar infrastructure. The society is collapsing in slow-mo; the AI datacenters are just exacerbating the problem of not being able to scale. They framed Nixon for impeachment over Project Independence, so this isn't an accident.

If this were a factory that needed huge amounts of water but there wasn't enough water for the factory the permit would simply be denied.

Notice how AI, datacenters, and electricity gets a special exception to the societal norms.

Partially it's the transhumanists who have a religious fervor in bringing about their AGI God, but part of it is just dumb bureaucrats who can't understand how anything, including Econ 101, works. Or they're just bribed, which happens to be a highly profitable technique.

We would certainly be at a disadvantage if Russia was able to copy rockets that constantly blew up shortly after launch.

I'll add to that Africa's geography is fucked... the coastline is old, smooth, and shallow which means you don't get many ports. On top of that, the African escarpment means that interior rivers tend to have huge rapids that are basically unnavigable. All of this greatly complicates logistics and hampers internal trade... for instance, getting minerals from the east Congo to the Atlantic requires ~9 different transports (e.g., switching back and forth between water and land vehicles). Europe and North America, by contrast, have an embarrassment of riches... loads of glacier-carved deep water ports, extensively navigable interior rivers, and (at least in the U.S.) lots of inter-coastal waterways.

Geography isn't the only thing that hindered Africa. Tropical diseases and the Tsetse fly also fucked things up pretty well by devastating livestock populations. Cattle means you can farm more land with fewer people (and fertilize it too), plus they're a food source. I'm sure there are other factors too, but these are big ones that would inhibit any would-be society.

Yeah, and when that bubble pops in a few months customers will look at them side-eyed.

We can't have those because they wanted to sell chicken meat to Germany after WWII.

No, really, Fat Electrician has a good video on it.

(our government is just a loony bin now)

I presume you're referring to the 2008 Chinese Milk Scandal? I'll point out this was something perpetrated by the Chinese industry, not American. It was knowingly covered up with the complicity of the Chinese government to prevent it from embarrassing the ongoing Olympics. Only when the scandal became impossible to cover up did the CCP take any action.

As of December 2025, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and former Mayor London Breed have both expressed praise for China and the relationship between San Francisco and Chinese cities.

First Street very likely doesn't have some magic model that can predict the future better than anyone else.

When you get a mortgage you have to pay for a flood survey. Even my house 700' above the village where the bank is.

Your flood risk is absolutely predicted by the flood history of your location. The bank writing the mortgage has the skin in the game which is why they make the buyer pay for the flood survey.

It sounds like First Street might be liable for damages based on pseudoscience if these Realtors bring a case. It would be interesting to see them present solid evidence that they prospectively beat the existing flood models and survive a cross-examination.

If they've published a peer-reviewed paper then I missed it.

Hostile design is often a sign of libido dominandi, not just laziness.

SmartTube has probably hundreds of settings you can tweak to improve usability and accessibility. The developer clearly has a user-first philosophy.